On finishing books you dislike

19 July 2026

For years I finished every book I started, on the theory that abandoning one was a small failure of character. This turns out to be an expensive theory. A book you are not enjoying costs you the book you would rather be reading, and that cost compounds quietly over a decade.

The rule I use now is fifty pages. If by then I am still reading out of duty rather than curiosity, the book goes back on the shelf without ceremony. Some of them come back years later and turn out to be excellent. Timing matters more than we admit.

The same walk, repeatedly

2 May 2026

There is a route near where I live that takes about forty minutes. I have walked it several hundred times. People assume this must be boring, but the opposite happens: once the route stops demanding attention, you start noticing what is actually there. Which trees leaf out first. Where the water collects after rain. Which windows are lit at seven in the morning.

Novelty is a cheap way to feel alert. Repetition is a slower one, and it lasts longer.

A short defence of paper

11 February 2026

I keep a paper notebook, not because it is better than the alternatives but because it is worse in useful ways. It cannot notify me. It cannot sync. Nothing in it is searchable, which means that finding an old note requires flipping through the pages around it, and that is frequently where the good ideas are hiding.

Every tool that removes friction also removes the part of the process that friction was protecting.

Coffee, eventually

23 November 2025

I spent an embarrassing amount of time optimising how I make coffee in the morning: grinders, ratios, water temperature, a scale accurate to a tenth of a gram. The coffee did get better. What improved more was the fifteen minutes of standing quietly in the kitchen doing one thing at a time before the day starts.

I suspect this is true of most hobbies that look, from the outside, like fussiness.